I hope everyone is having a great Small Business Saturday, and is celebrating accordingly! : ) Never heard of Small Business Saturday? I wouldn’t say I’m surprised. SBS always takes place the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and is great as it helps to encourage awareness about how spending your money with small and/or local businesses does great things for your community, your peers, and the overall economy, as opposed to just giving money to a huge corporation. For more info, you can check out the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SmallBusinessSaturday

I personally am spending SBS working on my own small business. I’ve been in severe need of upgrading my packaging to be more appealing (I currently use small plastic baggies with the name of the item and price taped down, which works, but just isn’t very pretty lol). I was recently approved to sell at some small local events (Art Walk at Jacksonville, FL), and have been checking out Pinterest for lots of craft show inspiration. I designed some cute, but simple package backing (picture below). I think I’ll go ahead and make a tutorial for them, as they’re rather easy, but I think are a great way to display jewelry~

Interested in keeping up with what’s happening with me and my shop? You can sign up for my email newsletter here: mad.ly/signups/125141/join If you’d like to see more pictures and get more details regarding my purselets, you can see them in the Purselet section of my shop: monostache.storenvy.com/collec…

I realized I never actually made a post about the new crappy policy that Etsy adopted, and had only talked about it with friends on their personal Facebooks. Long story short, Etsy was originally an online market for handcraft artisans to sell their items, and now they no longer care to do that because they can make more money by letting cheap Chinese manufacturers sell on their site. This article goes into the issue in more detail:www.huffingtonpost.com/shannon…how-etsy-changed-the-rule_b_5708565.html

So I’ve gone ahead and decided to make a new shop with Store Envy, which I am really liking so far. It’s very easy to customize and organize everything, as well as copy listings to make things easy when selling similar items. The biggest problem with Store Envy is the traffic is pretty much nonexistent, but I am hoping the fact that I am keeping my original shop name will allow customers and admirers of my Etsy shop to find the new shop easily. monostache.storenvy.com

I’m getting super excited for AWA this next weekend in Atlanta! Been missing out on a bit of sleep, trying to juggle both work AND making costumes, but it will totally be worth it! For anyone who doesn’t know, I LOVE Fate/Stay Night. So I will be doing a LOT of Fate cosplay over the weekend. Please feel free to come up and say hi if you see me, and if you’re interested, I will be running a brand new panel “Cosplay Couples”, which is all about the experiences of cosplaying with a friend or significant other! The panel will be held in room 103 (aka the Cosplay Panel room) Friday at 6:45pm.

Decided to go ahead and put up some new Pokemon designs into the shop. they aren’t beautiful, as they’re just photos of concept art sketches, but after having quite a bit of interest in them, I figured I’d go ahead and make listings for them. Once I have made a finished hoodie for them, I’ll be taking photos of it and replacing the crappy concept art sketches. 😛